I’m part of a Spotify family. Sure, the work I do means that I’m also a regular user of other music streaming services such as Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz, but more often than not it’s my Spotify account that’s streaming through the devices in my family’s home, car, and on my phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. While Spotify doesn’t have that pristine clarity and definition of the hi-resolution streams of those other services, Spotify has them all beat when it comes to its user friendliness, music discovery, and its algorithm-generated playlists. Well, except for one little problem that’s dogged me for years.
You see, I have tinnitus. This means that when I sleep, I use white noise to help cancel out the annoying tone that rings in my head when it’s quiet at night. It kind of sounds like a low idling a truck or like when you put your thumb on the tip of a live guitar patch cord and hold it there … indefinitely. It can be maddening.
The only thing that I’ve ever found that stops it dead in its tracks is a 180Hz “Brown Noise” track that I found on Spotify. It’s only 3:26 in length, so I play it on repeat all night when I sleep. It’s blissful and I can’t live without it.
The problem is, the repetition wreaks havoc on my Spotify algorithm, and it thinks that all I want to hear is weird new-age ambient music, zen ocean sounds, and soothing night rain storms with rolling distant thunder. My new release suggestions and other generated playlists, especially the all-popular Discovery Weekly, have been wrought with the stuff forever, and while Spotify does offer several other ways to discover new music, I’ve longed to just fire up that weekly, tailored playlist, enjoy the tunes and maybe find something new.
First-world problems, I know. Like I mentioned before, I do listen to other music services, and that track is available on those services as well, so finding a fix for this hasn’t been a top priority. But enough is enough, so I recently decided to get to the bottom of it. It took about a week, and I’m happy to report that it worked.
How to train your Spotify algorithm dragon
This isn’t a new technique, but it was new to me. To train your Spotify algorithm to ignore certain music you don’t want fouling up your generated playlists, you can remove things from what’s called your “Taste Profile.” It’s easy to do, but it only works with playlists and not albums or individual tracks. Luckily, my sleep playlist is just called “Tinnitus Relief,” and it just has the one track in it. Here’s what I did.
Step 1: Create a playlist with all the tracks or examples of tracks and music genres that you want the algorithm to avoid. In my case, it’s just that one brown noise track, but it has to be on a playlist.
Step 2: Open the playlist and tap the three-dot “…” menu.
Step 3: Scroll down and tap Exclude from your taste profile. A notification is generated that says “Listening to this playlist will have less impact on your taste profile and recommendations.” Thank the maker.
Step 4: One thing to note is that your algorithm is also based on tracks and albums that you’ve liked. Also, if you play any of the tracks in your excluded playlist(s) on their own from outside the playlist, then it is tracked and may inform your taste profile.
Step 5: If you want to go one step further, before going to bed I also went through the Spotify app’s Settings and Privacy and social areas and selected Private session. This apparently also hides whatever you’re listening to from the algorithm, but only for a period of up to 6 hours. I did both, just to be thorough.
My new tasty profile
I didn’t see results immediately, as the Discover Weekly playlist is updated, um, weekly on Mondays. But lo and behold, the following Monday my Discover Weekly playlist was no longer dominated by night-time cricket sounds, spacey ambient artists, and rain storms. It instead features a nice mix of music I frequently listen to as well as some surprises and even stuff I’ve never heard of before. Much better.
I’m going to keep training it with new playlists to see how dialed in I can get my algorithm. I also have a 13-year-old daughter who has several playlists on my Spotify account, and while she’s developing an excellent taste in music, there’s some lingering Katy Perry and other anomalies on there that are worse than an idling truck.